A Letter of Aron Baron from Tashkent [1929]

In
1929 Aron Baron was serving a term of exile in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
He wrote the following letter to Yakov [/Jacques/Yanya] Doubinsky in
Paris. The original is found in the International Institute of Social
History, Senya Fléchine papers, Folder 50b, p. 17.

Translated
from the Russian original and annotated by Malcolm Archibald, who
would like to thank Elijah Bukreev for help in transcribing Aron’s handwriting.

Tashkent
July 5 1929

Greetings,
old friend!

I’m
replying to you with a slight delay because I want to share with you
excerpts from an interesting book which I have just finished. This
book was printed for the third time in 1928. It’s called
Adjutant
of Gen. Mai-Maevsky
by P. V. Makarov, the chief of a partisan unit in Crimea.i
He describes how he taken prisoner by the Whites, fooled them, and
became an adjutant of the General. And when they exposed him, he
escaped and became a partisan. Remarkably interesting memories! Among
other things, he mentions some of our mutual friends. He tells about
Lugovik’s group in Simferopol, about Alyosha Bulanov, about Safian
Spiro-Berg and his wife Lisa, and other activists of the anti-Denikin
underground.ii
You can’t help laughing when you read how the Whites arrested 40
“redheads,” but missed their intended target, Safian, because he
had dyed his hair brown. Meanwhile, Lisa had bleached her jet-black
hair with peroxide and become a blonde. If you can manage it, get
this book and read it. Is there a branch of the State Publishing
House where you are?iii

Do
I still need a subscription to
l’Humanité?
No, I don’t really need it. But if you can, please order me a
subscription to the London
Daily
Herald
.iv

So,
my friend, you’re going to the old place in Chicago? Of course, I
would have liked to see the old place, but I’m not thrilled about
the idea of living there. Not that I’m happy with my role as an
involuntary spectator, which it’s my lot to bear. And yet
emigration doesn’t tempt me in the least – I’m telling you this
quite sincerely.

You
asked for Luba’s address, here it is: M. Fagin, 11903 Imperial
Ave., Cleveland, Ohio. Luba has a teenage daughter Sophie – a
splendid person! She and I are great friends; she writes poetry, and
she was active in supporting Sacco and Vanzetti along with her mother
and father. When you get there, be sure to give her a kiss from me.v

Greetings
from Fanny to you, Yanya, and the rest of our friends. Let’s
nourish ourselves with hopes for the future. Greetings, Aron.

i.
Pavel Makarov’s
Adjutant of Gen. Mai-Maevsky, was published
in 1927 and went through five printings in the next two years. His
book belonged to a genre, civil war memoirs, which came under
increasing attack in the late 1920s in the USSR due to alleged
exaggerations and outright falsifications. There were numerous
complaints about Makarov’s book in particular. A commission was
set up to investigate these complaints and Makarov ended up losing
his pension, while his book soon became a bibliographical rarity.
During World War II Makarov recouped his fortunes by putting his
partisan experience to good use behind enemy lines. His book was
back in print in the 1960s and he lived to see it made into a
miniseries shown on Soviet television in 1969.

ii.
The underground group led by the veteran revolutionary Luka Lugovik
included both anarchists and communists. The anarchist
Alyosha
Bulanov
(1891-1970) is known to history by many names, but was born Izrail
Khaykelevich Ulanovsky in Kishinev, Bessarabia. After fighting as an
anarchist in the Russian civil war, he joined the Soviet
intelligence services and held postings all over the world,
including the USA (1931-1934). Although he survived Stalin’s
purges initially, he and his family were arrested in 1948 and
sentenced to long terms in the gulags.
Safian
Spiro-Berg
was a
prominent member of the Nabat Anarchist Confederation in 1919-1920
and wrote for its press. Jewish with red hair, his nickname in the
movement was in fact “The Redhead.” His wife Lisa was a Polish
Jew. Safian perished in August 1920 while on a mission to Nestor
Makhno.

iii.
Baron is referring to Communist Party bookstores which distributed
Soviet literature.

iv.L’Humanité was the daily organ of the French Communist
Party and readily available in the Soviet Union. The
Daily Herald
was owned by the British Trade Union Congress (TUC) in the 1920s,
but took a consistently pro-Soviet line and so may have been allowed
to circulate freely in the USSR.